Rand Wacker

What is Konfabulator?

PVRblog

If I didn’t already love my old Wetsuit 2.0 neoprene case that I salvaged from my Vaio Z505 to use on my new Apple, I’d get one of these: Willow Ashcroft 12 inch Powerbook Sylph

Here’s a term that has popped up with unsettling regularity for me in the past few days. I’ve heard it 4 different times in the past three days, all in completely different settings, so I had to do a little research.

The original definition I heard was, “Just gay enough to get all the chicks.” An alternative definition was suggested as “someone who in any rural setting would be considered a flaming homosexual, but in a metropolitan setting is simply considered trendy.”

My friend Sandy first noticed this term when at a reunion with some old co-workers. One of his friends greeted him with, “at least I still dress better than you.” To which Sandy replied, “yeah, but at least I still look straight.” Friend in question was the prototypical metrosexual.

So I did a little Googling and found many articles. Apparently, David Beckham is the epitomal metrosexual, but only because of his narcisistic tendancies. I must disagree, I know plenty of completely generous metrosexuals, or maybe they’re just plain gay and flirting.

UPDATE: It’s like wildfire I tell ya, check out this craigslist post from just today.

We haven’t had cable for a while and it’s been a nice break. A really nice break actually, but I’ll complain about that later. So we decided we might as well go for it again; not coincident with the final season of Sex and the City. Around here, Comcast is the only game in town for landline cable (I guess they bought AT&T Broadband???). I already had a Tivo, and I’ve got a TV Tuner in my desktop computer so all I wanted to get was regular old analog cable. Couldn’t find it on their website (big suprise). So I went to price their digital cable assuming I’d have to call to find out about analog cable. Couldn’t even find a channel lineup for digital cable. So I called their customer support line, and they couldn’t answer my questions. How incompetant are the people who run this company?

While I was waiting on the phone I decided to see if DirecTv’s website could answer my questions. Within thirty seconds I found out everything I wanted to know, and found out that it was cheaper than cable!. Hung up with Comcast and never looked back.
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Anthony gave up on trying to get Movable Type to work and just setup something on Livejournal: random spew.

I guess I can’t blame him for wanting to come up with a completely original design, and that’s quite a bit of work for all of MT’s templates. But there’s no reason he couldn’t have started with a basic template on MT and evolved it as he wanted (heck, MT let’s you create multiple outputs anyways. It’s not like Livejournal let’s him doing something completely unique! Besides, now when he switches (if he ever does, and I doubt that), he’s going to lose all of previous content!

I’m sure you’ve heard of Friendster by now. The graph-theory-gone-bad web site which is trying to unseat match.com with it’s huge <1999>viral marketing</1999> push. I figured it was one of those interesting communities which would live in online discussions only, like Kittenhate.com.

But that view changed yesterday when I was talking to a non-geek friend at a BBQ and she wanted me to send her some information and instead of giving me her email address said, “I think we’re linked on Friendster”. It was the best geek-legitimizing comment I’d heard all day, or maybe it was just the beer. So I went through tonight checking on existing friends to see who else had joined recently that I needed to link to. Hoping to push into the quarter million connection range pretty soon.

In any case, I’m interested to see what FSP (Friendster Service Provider) sites show up (like all those “eBay Service sites). Maybe companies that will arrange a “Table for Six Degrees” situation, or people selling shirts with connection graphs on them.

And speaking of graphs, two things that Friendster needs to do… First, make it possible to show how many other ways your connected to someone who is already your friend. To someone whose “In a committed relationship” and “Just here to help”, cruising around to see how intertwined your friend trees get is really about all the entertainment we get out of the site. Also, they should offer a callable “Friendster Counter” so people can show a realtime number of how many people are in their personal network on their own web page (I’m currently connected to 187185 people through 35 friends). Get on it Friendsters! Well, maybe after you fix your scaling problems.

Speakeasy Netshare is a new service by my DSL ISP, Speakeasy.net, which allows their broadband subscribers to share their WiFi connections with neighbors, and Speakeasy will provide email, news, and dialup accounts for those people for as little as $20 a month, kicking back 50% of the proceeds back to you.

This is a great idea. When most other broadband providers are scrambling to update their Terms of Service to forbid connection sharing, scanning for common NAT appliances, and generally being clueless about the evolution of connectivity, Speakeasy is on the forefront of what people want/need/are doing, and allowing their subscribers to profit, while making a small sum for themselves.

It’s this kind of forward thinking that keeps impressing me about Speakeasy. First their Sysadmin-friendly service package, their extremely logical service provisioning, and excellent customer service. I highly recommend them for all your broadband needs.

Now if only the RIAA could see the writing on the wall as Speakeasy has.

Check out what Soekris Engineering has to offer. A small, low-power computer with three ethernet ports and a PCMCIA slot for a WaveLan card. The perfect micro-firewall solution for people who want something more powerful than a Linksys or Netgear but quieter than a full PC as a firewall.

BlueRobot - There’s nothing wrong with gray.